The Glass Palace. Amitav Ghosh
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secreted within the forest. What exactly these riches were he didn’t know but it was clear that he would never find out except by seeing for himself.
Even while pondering this, he was walking quickly, heading away from the bazaar. Now, looking around to take stock of where he was, he discovered that he had come to the whitewashed facade of a church. He decided to linger, walking past the church once, and then again. He circled and waited, and sure enough, within the hour he spotted Saya John approaching the church, hand in hand with his son.
‘Saya.’
‘Rajkumar!’
Now, standing face to face with Saya John, Rajkumar found himself hanging his head in confusion. How was he to tell him about Ma Cho, when it was he himself who was responsible for the Saya’s cuckolding?
It was Saya John who spoke first: ‘Has something happened to Ma Cho?’
Rajkumar nodded.
‘What is it? Has she gone?’
‘Yes, Saya.’
Saya John gave a long sigh, rolling his eyes heavenwards. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a sign that the time has come for this sinner to turn celibate.’
‘Saya?’
‘Never mind. And what will you.do now, Rajkumar? Go back to India in your boat?’
‘No, Saya.’ Rajkumar shook his head. ‘I want to stay here, in Burma.’
‘And what will you do for a living?’
‘You said, Saya, that if I ever wanted a job I was to come to you. Saya?’
One morning the King read in the newspapers that the Viceroy was coming to Madras. In a state of great excitement he sent for Mr Cox.
‘Is the Viceroy going to call on us?’ he asked.
Mr Cox shook his head. ‘Your Highness, I have not been informed of any such plan.’
‘But protocol demands it. The Kings of Burma are the peers of such sovereigns as the kings of Siam and Cambodia and of the emperors of China and Japan.’
‘I regret, Your Highness, that it is probably too late to effect a change in the Viceroy’s itinerary.’
‘But we must see him, Mr Cox.’
‘The Viceroy’s time has already been spoken for. I am sorry.’
‘But we wish to find out what the Government plans to do with us. When we came here, we were told that this was not to be our permanent residence. We are eager to know where we are to live and when we are to go there.’
Mr Cox went away and came back a few days later. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘I am glad to be able to inform you that the matter of a permanent residence for you and your family has finally been resolved.’
‘Oh?’ said the King. ‘And where is it to be?’
‘A place by the name of Ratnagiri.’
‘What?’ The King stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Where is this place?’
‘Some hundred and twenty miles south of Bombay. An excellent place, with fine views of the sea.’
‘Fine views?’
The King sent for a map and asked Mr Cox to show him where Ratnagiri was. Mr Cox indicated a point somewhere between Bombay and Goa. The King was thoroughly alarmed to note that the place was too insignificant to be marked on the map.
‘But we would rather be in a city, Mr Cox. Here in Madras. Or Bombay. Or Calcutta. What will we do in a small village?’
‘Ratnagiri is a district headquarters, Your Highness, not a village by any means.’
‘How long are we to remain there? When will we be allowed to return to Burma?’
Now it was Mr Cox’s turn to be nonplussed. It had not occurred to him that the King still harboured hopes of returning to Burma.
Mr Cox was a kindly man, in his gruff way. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, in a quiet and gentle voice, ‘you must prepare yourself to be in Ratnagiri for some time, a considerable time I fear. Perhaps …’
‘Perhaps for ever?’
‘Those were not my words.’ Mr Cox coughed. ‘Not at all. Those words were not mine. No, I must insist, they were not …’
The King rose to his feet abruptly and went to his room. He did not step out again for several days.
They left Madras a month later on a steamer called the Clive. The voyage was very different this time around. They sailed along the coast with the shore rarely out of sight. They went through the Palk Straits, with the northern tip of Ceylon visible on the left, and the southernmost point in India, Cape Comorin, in view on the right.
Four days after leaving Madras the Clive nosed into a wide and sunlit bay. There were cliffs at either end of the bay, a sweeping beach and a meandering river. The town was on a hill, above the bay; it was so thickly blanketed with coconut palms that very little could be seen of it.
They spent the night on the steamer and went ashore the next morning. The Clive pulled in beside a jetty that reached a long way out into the shallow bay. Carriages were waiting for them at the far end, near a fishing village. The King was greeted with a gun salute and a guard of honour. Then the carriages set off in single file down a narrow, tree-shaded path. There were red-tiled houses on either side, with gardens of mango trees and areca palms. There were policemen everywhere, holding back the people who’d gathered to watch. They passed a bazaar and a grey-walled gaol and a line of police-barracks. The road ended at a large, two-storeyed bungalow set inside a walled garden. It was on a bluff above the town, overlooking the bay. It was called Outram House.
The King went in first and climbed slowly up the stairs. He came to a large bedroom and went inside. The room was furnished with a desk, a bed and three armchairs. It opened on to a small balcony that faced westwards, towards the sea. The King walked very slowly round the room. He toyed with the slatted wooden shutters, scratched at a rosette of candlewax and ran a finger over a half-effaced mark on the wall, crumbling the flaking plaster between finger and thumb. There was a faintly musty smell in the room and a tracing of mildew on the wall. He tried to mark these things in his memory for he knew they would fade in time and a day would come when he would want to remember them – the vividness of his first encounter with the site of his captivity, the sour mildewed smell of it and the roughness of its texture upon the skin.
Downstairs Dolly was running across the garden with the First Princess, chasing a lizard of a bright red colour. This was different from the mansion in Madras, much smaller but more welcoming. Here one could run and play hide-and-seek between the trunks of leaning coconut palms. She came to a mango tree whose branches reached all the way up to a window on the top floor of the bungalow. Perhaps that would be her room, her window, with twigs scratching against the glass.
A bell began to ring in a temple, somewhere in the town below. She stopped to listen, looking down the slope of the garden, across the canopy of coconut fronds, towards the wide sparkling bay. She could smell drying fish and incense. How bright it was, how peaceful. Everything seemed so safe here, behind these high stone walls.
The King heard the bells too. He stepped out on to the balcony of the upstairs bedroom. The whole town lay spread out below, framed by the sweep of the bay and the two steep promontories on either side. The view was magnificent, just as Mr Cox had said. He went back into the bedroom. He sat in one of the armchairs and watched the ghostly shadows of coconut palms swaying on the room’s white plaster walls. In this room the hours would accumulate like grains of sand until they buried him.